


December 6: what you leave behind

by dizzy



Series: farewell and gtfo 2016 daily fic advent [6]
Category: Glee RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2016-12-06
Packaged: 2018-09-06 23:31:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8773780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dizzy/pseuds/dizzy
Summary: prompt: star trek!cc





	

Darren has a favorite holodeck program. When the stars feel too vast outside his window and home feels very far away, he goes there to sit and play his guitar 

It’s a simple setting; a too-small apartment in San Francisco. A coffee table littered with PADDs, jackets hung up behind the door, the scent of the air crisp and sharp like fall but the temperature just on the right side of pleasant. 

He’s programmed in Cooper and Brian, but not Chris. He could, if he wanted to; Chris offered, even, to do the scans the system would need to recreate him. Darren said no; said it wouldn’t feel right, like he’d be cheating. 

(To which Chris had said, “You’d fuck a hologram?” like he was both surprised and somehow not at all surprised at the same time.) 

He sits on the worn out sofa they should have replaced three years ago and strums a familiar song and tries to pretend like half his heart isn’t somewhere else. 

*

They’ve been in love for years and years. Since Chris moved to San Francisco on an outside contract with Starfleet Academy and they ran into each other in the mess hall the first week of Darren’s third year. 

Their story isn’t that special. They danced around each other for a month, until Darren worked up the nerve to kiss Chris for the first time. They went on dates and met each other’s families and slowly insinuated themselves into each other’s lives until Chris no longer thought about going back home and Darren no longer thought of home as anywhere but where Chris was. 

Chris is still home. Chris will be home, Darren hopes, for a very long time. But Darren wasn’t in the Academy because he felt satisfied with being tethered to one place. 

He tried, for a while. He took a position assistant teaching because his professors all recommended him for it, because he’s a quick learner with a penchant for putting nervous first years at ease. But he was bored. Not bored with Chris, but wilting under the unchanging routine of life. 

So Chris told him to go, and Darren went, and missing home - missing Chris - has settled in the same way boredom had before, a different feeling but the same in how lost it leaves him. 

*

Sometimes Chris has nightmares. He sees ships exploding and warfare on planets. He thinks Darren takes too many risks and doesn’t think things through. It’s fine, it’s cute even, when Chris is there to protect him. But Darren is very far away and no one else on that ship will make Darren their first priority like Chris would (has, does). 

Sometimes Chris wishes he’d just gone through Starfleet like he always want to as a kid. It was his dream, like it was the dream of most children, but Chris never had the kind of grades you need to get into the Academy and a lifetime of being told he just wasn’t the Starfleet type (sometimes kindly, sometimes not) wore the dream away. He’s glad now, because while their intentions may not have been kind Chris can say with an honest voice that he would have hated the confines of Starfleet. It’s the best way to get into space, unless you’re very rich or very lucky, but he can’t imagine signing years of his life away. He wants a place to come back to at the end of the day that’s his, that he’s built and gets to keep. 

But he wants it with Darren, and that won’t happen if Darren doesn’t come back home and those are the thoughts that plague Chris in the night. . 

*

(Darren has nightmares, too. He dreams of Chris growing tired of waiting and wakes up cold.)

*

Chris puts up the Christmas decorations alone. He has a fake tree and box of ornaments that are half his and half Darren’s. Darren’s half are mostly from other planets, trinkets collected by his parents and brothers, stories behind them all. Chris’s are more earth-typical, bought in a set save a few his mother insisted that Darren take the last time they visited Chris’s parents around the holidays. 

Darren will be here for Christmas this year. It’s more coincidence than a kindness. The ship is scheduled for mandatory upkeep from the last week of December through the first week of January. Darren will arrive three days before Christmas. 

Chris wants Darren home but he hates the nervous dread in the pit of his stomach. It’ll fade; it always does. Darren’s been gone almost a year and within a few hours, without fail, it feels like he’s never left. But that feeling never passes until it’s had a chance to come and go and Chris will spend weeks of buildup with a knot in his stomach. 

This is what he can do, though: make the house as cozy and festive as possible. Walk the dog and cuddle the cat. Report in the minutiae of his day to day life with every call and email, keeping them bound together through voluntary entwinement since they aren’t here to live each others days together. He can be patient, and he can love Darren, and he can hope that one day the stars align for them.


End file.
